Day: January 10, 2021

Limited materials have survived to tell us about morality plays of this period. Here is Dorothy Wertz’s description of the extant materials:

What survives is (1) texts, sometimes in several versions of varying corruption; (2) occasional stage diagrams or instructions for costuming; (3) writings of reformist clergy who disliked theater; (4) account books of the guilds, listing expenditures and properties for performances (p 443).

These materials give a sense of what stage, costumes, and props were used in the sixteenth century for the morality plays as well as performance style. Some of the details were surmised from plays other than Everyman.

The religious plays were staged on holidays as an upbeat part of the festivities (Twycross, “Genres,” p 258). One of the several things that makes Everyman unique is its seriousness (Tydemann, p 18).

When presenting the morality plays, the producers were not concerned with photorealism in their sets. Tydemann wrote that they relied on improvisation and imagination (p 171). He also observed that they created “small-scale illusions of reality.” He noted examples of a realistic staging of Cain murdering Abel or “blood from the side of the stricken Christ appears to spurt out and cure the blind Centurion” or the “torments of the Savior.” He continued that he didn’t believe the elements clashed for the audience to ruin the experience (Tydemann, p 173).

This juxtaposition of the real and the unreal also served the edification goal of the plays. It created a shared lasting and immediate memory of the event:

...though the actor is not Christ and the audience are aware of this, the presence of another human body viscerally enacting the torments of the Saviour, transforms the story and its relevance into a real, felt presence making it even more immediate than imagining the same scene, the impact of which could be felt directly by the audience. Carole Wright, p 32

During the Middle Ages, there were few site-specific performance venues to stage drama. And when it came time to stage the morality plays, the producers had to use what was available (Tydemann, p 163). Plays could have scenes constructed on a series of wagons that moved or the audience walked from one to the other, build at an outdoor location, an inn yard, or be performed indoors (Tydemann, p 33, 78, 104). Any of these locations might be what we think of as multi-use sites:

We have to remember that they did not have distinct buildings called theatres dedicated solely to the performance of drama. The nearest to these were the ‘playing places’ of East Anglia and elsewhere, where the major place-and-scaffold plays were enacted: but even they, once the theatrical game was over, could revert to venues for football or wrestling. Meg Twycross, “Genres,” p 259.

Medieval acting was presentational. The characters they portrayed were not complex and the roles rarely demand nuance (Tydemann, p 181). Twycross noted that the plays employed many non-naturaluralistic techniques in performance: breaking the fourth wall, masks, allegory, and symbolic action (“Masks,” p 233). “All theatre is illusion, but this draws attention to the fact” (“Genres,” p 258).

And finally, moralities were not fully masked presentations. Instead of concealing the wearer, they commented on their moral state. This found its roots in the cultural belief that state of the soul was reflected on the body like corruption or ambivalence (“Masks,” p 234, 277). And while they are not described as wearing a mask, Twycross made a costuming note on Death in Everyman:

The text gives no guidance about Death’s appearance, alluding only to his spear; but the woodcut prefacing the printed editions shows a wholly traditional skeletal Death, suggesting that this was how he was envisaged by readers, and most probably also audiences of the play. “Masks,” p 250.

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Twycross, Meg. “Codes and Genres.” Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture c.1350–c.1500 Edited by Peter Brown. Medieval English Theatre. Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2007.

Twycross, Meg, and Sarah Carpenter. Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England, Taylor & Francis Group, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uidaho/ detail.action ?docID=4817054.

Twycross, Meg. “The Theatre.” The Blackwell Companion to the Bible and Culture. Edited by Sawyer, John F. A. Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2006.

Tydemann, W. English Medieval Theatre. 1400-1500. Routledge & Kegan Paul. (London) 1986.

Wertz, Dorothy. “Conflict Resolution in the Medieval Morality Plays” The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Dec., 1969), pp.438-453. Sage Publications, Inc. https://www.jstor.org/stable/173563. Last Accessed: Jan 7, 2021.

Wright, Clare. Sound, Body and Space: Audience Experience in Late Medieval English Drama. PhD thesis, University of Nottingham. 2011. Access from the University of Nottingham repository: http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/13108/1/555408.pdf. Last accessed: Jan 1, 2021.

The sixteenth century morality plays were staged at a time when mortality outpaced the birth rate due largely to war, famine, and disease. Clifford Davidson wrote that cities maintained population size with an influx of immigrants (Davidson). A person living during this period was keenly aware that death could come without warning.

Morality plays, which were first presented by the church then the guilds with church oversight, offered meaning in God’s world. By staging them outside of the church and in the vernacular, it reinforced Christ’s presence in the everyday world. That God was not only found in hallowed halls. The writers told stories of Jesus Christ and his time on earth, his care for humankind and the sacrifice to redeem humankind (Tydemann, p 10; Wertz, p 541; Kaula, p 9). Using the morality plays , the church was able to edify and prepare congregations for the day of reckoning. Dorothy Wertz wrote that the presentations could inspire audiences to face their own accounting after seeing a stage character repent and be redeemed:

The audience, facing together the figure that all of them must at some future time meet separately, perhaps gained a measure of assurance in the face of their own deaths, an assurance that vastly increased when they later saw Manssoul saved (Wertz, p 446.)

The Christian lessons in these plays were shown to the audiences allegorically, using simpler ideas to express complex ones. Braswell described allegory as a sort of “continuing metaphor” as a series of related images or acts (p 125-126). This overlay of ideas would at times distance the audience from the action of the play causing them to reflect on what was happening.

Along with impression left on the audience, the allegorical qualities also served to bring the audience out of the story at times. This might be akin to Brecht’s distancing effect. Everyman would describe what had transpired and what it meant for their future. This in turn caused the audience to reflect on their own lives (Garner, p 283).

Morality plays were noted for their transformative power and one of the reasons cited for that by Meg Twycross was their immediacy. It made it a personal memory which stayed with the attendees after the event. This same immediacy was something Garner argued would be lost in the allegorical distancing (Garner, p 283; Twycross, “Theatre,” p 340; Wright, p 257). If the morality plays were moving between immediacy and distancing, it would’ve have created an interesting frisson for the audience.

It was this staying power that Davidson found that would give a morality play its strength as he eloquently described here:

… the power of such a play as Everyman, even if read rather than staged, would presumably have been more deeply felt than today and would have left a more powerful lasting impression. The intended visual effect, whether on stage or in the imaginations of readers, was to create a kind of memory theater to which the mind would return again and again as a way of being reminded in symbolic terms of human mortality and the consequences of one’s actions in this life. Clifford Davidson

Attending morality plays, created memories of sensations experienced witnessing the story which stayed with the audience (Wright, p 242). It made the play and the allegories within present with the audience after the morality play had concluded.

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Braswell, Laurel.  “The Visionary Voyage in Science Fiction and Medieval Allegory,” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, Winter 1981, Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 125-142. University of Manitoba. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24780359.  Last Accessed: Jan 9, 2021.

Davidson, Clifford. “Introduction.” Everyman and Its Dutch Original, Elckerlijc. Eds: Davidson, Clifford Davidson; Martin W. Walsh; Ton J. Broos. 2007. d.lib.rochester.edu/ teams/ text/ davidson-everyman-introduction. Last accessed: Jan 9, 2021.

Garner, Jr., Stanton B. “Theatricality in ‘Mankind’ and ‘Everyman’” Studies in Philology, Summer, Vol. 84, No. 3 (Summer, 1987), pp. 272-285 University of North Carolina Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4174272. Last accessed: Dec 1, 2020.

Kaula, David. “Time and the Timeless in Everyman and Dr. Faustus” College English, Oct., 1960, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Oct., 1960), pp. 9-14. Published by: National Council of Teachers of English. https://www.jstor.org/stable/373857. Last Accessed Dec 22, 2020.

Twycross, Meg. “The Theatre.” The Blackwell Companion to the Bible and Culture. Edited by Sawyer, John F. A. Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2006.

Tydemann, W. English Medieval Theatre. 1400-1500. Routledge & Kegan Paul. (London) 1986.

Wertz, Dorothy. “Conflict Resolution in the Medieval Morality Plays” The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Dec., 1969, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Dec., 1969), pp.438-453. Sage Publications, Inc. https://www.jstor.org/stable/173563. Last Accessed: Jan 7, 2021.

Wright, Clare. Sound, Body and Space: Audience Experience in Late Medieval English Drama. PhD thesis, University of Nottingham. 2011. Access from the University of Nottingham repository: http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/13108/1/555408.pdf. Last accessed: Jan 1, 2021.